Obama must return Nobel Peace Prize, demands Israeli lawmaker

If true that the former US president protected Hezbollah terrorists leading up to the Iran nuclear deal, Obama must return his Nobel Peace Prize, says Yair Lapid.

By: World Israel News staff

Former US President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize just 10 months after being sworn in back in 2009,  and the head of a major Israeli political party has now raised the issue of Obama’s fitness for the honor in light of recent revelations.

Former Finance Minister Yair Lapid, who chairs the Yesh Atid party, specifically referred to a report published by Politico on Monday that describes an Obama administration strategy to thwart efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to shut down a major source of Hezbollah’s funding, namely its international drug trafficking and criminal enterprise.

The DEA, which collaborated with American and foreign law enforcement and investigatory agencies on “Project Cassandra,” spent eight years on the trail of Hezbollah’s criminal operations, which covered drugs, weapons and money laundering to the tune of around $1 billion in annual revenues.

The Politico report, based on interviews, government documents and court records, describes a pattern of roadblocks set up by Obama’s officials to prevent prosecutions of key figures in the operation, which was connecting the dots between the Lebanon-based terror proxy and its primary sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Obama administration’s obstacles were allegedly part of a strategy to appease Iran until the nuclear deal could be signed.

Israel, which is the Hezbollah terrorist group’s primary target, remained a vocal critic of the Iran deal.

On Monday, Lapid told party members that if the report is correct, then “Obama must return his Nobel Peace Prize.”

“Israel warned time and again that there cannot be a connection between the nuclear deal and counter-terror activity, especially against Hezbollah,” said Lapid. “We warned specifically [about the Hezbollah-Iran deal connection], because of the known link between Hezbollah and Iran.”

Former ambassador to US: Revelations not surprising

The revelations regarding “the Obama administration’s attempts to thwart federal investigations against Hezbollah and laundering drug money for terrorism do not surprise me or any Israeli who was involved in the effort to prevent a bad nuclear deal. It was clear that the [Obama] administration was willing to do anything to come to an agreement,” Michael Oren, a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, stated. Oren, who served as US Ambassador to the US for four years during the Obama administration, authored a book, titled Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, in which he documented what he perceived as hostility towards the Jewish state and the Netanyahu government in particular.